O3 Southbank
This is a membership space that sells coffee, starting at $14.99 a week, and not the all-day brunch cafe the listings promise.
Why go
O3 opened on Queensbridge Street in February 2025 as a work and study room with a cafe attached, modelled on a flagship the founder built in Newmarket, Auckland (Southbank Local News). Luca Yang started the idea after nearly dropping out of high school and finding, in a Beijing alleyway coffee shop, that the room he was in changed how much he wanted to read. What he built out of that is booths for study and meetings, cooperative areas, a self-service convenience store, and three membership tiers at $14.99, $29.99 and $39.99 a week. Students are the largest group in the room. If you are in Southbank with a laptop and three hours, that is a genuinely useful thing. If you want a Melbourne coffee, nothing published about this place tells you who roasts the beans or who is pulling the shots.
Order this / avoid
- Order: a coffee and a booth, which is the transaction this room is built around. Whatever is in the convenience store if you need to eat.
- Avoid: planning a proper coffee stop around it. No roaster, no brew method and no barista is on record anywhere, and Melbourne is not a city where that is a small omission.
What locals & experts say
- Yihan Ai, Southbank Local News (May 2025), reporting the opening:
O3, a membership-based cafe and workplace, officially opened on Queensbridge St in Southbank in February.
1 - Luca Yang, founder and CEO, on what the space is for:
People can accomplish great things when they are left free and motivated by their environment. Education shouldn't be top-down instruction, it should be bottom-up exploration.
1 - The gaps, stated plainly. O3 does not appear in Time Out's 42 Best Cafes in Melbourne (October 2025), Broadsheet has never covered it, and no Melbourne chef names it across 74 industry picks. Nobody has assessed the coffee.
Good to know
- Where: 87 Queensbridge Street, Southbank, close to MCEC.
- What it is: a membership work and study space with coffee and a self-service convenience store, not a conventional cafe.
- Cost: memberships at $14.99, $29.99 and $39.99 a week. Whether a non-member can walk in and buy a coffee is not established, so check before you rely on it.
- The room: a converted warehouse with shelves of books, booths and study corners.
- Website: the operator's root domain works. The Melbourne page linked by the local paper now returns a 404.
- Hygiene: Victoria publishes no consumer-facing food-hygiene rating, so there is no Australian equivalent of an FSA score to record.
Jeff's take (his words)
- Note: Local gem
Verdict
listed — This is a paid study room with an espresso machine, and it is worth saying that plainly because the listings sell it as a cafe. O3 opened on Queensbridge Street in February 2025, modelled on a flagship in Newmarket, Auckland, and it runs on memberships at $14.99, $29.99 or $39.99 a week, with students the biggest group. What is inside is cooperative areas, booths for meetings and study, a self-service convenience store and coffee. Nothing on record establishes a roaster, a brew method, a barista or a competition placing, which are the four things Melbourne coffee is actually judged on, and it appears in neither Time Out's forty-two-cafe list nor anything Broadsheet has published. If you need somewhere near MCEC to work for three hours, this is a real answer. As a coffee stop it is unproven, and the all-day brunch some listings promise is not a thing any source describes.